U.S. Navy Bets $42 Billion on Carriers in China’s Sights

By Roxana Tiron -
Jun 19, 2012

The U.S. Navy is betting $42 billion
on a new class of aircraft carriers, the world’s biggest and
costliest warships ever, even as the Pentagon budget shrinks and
China and Iran arm themselves with weapons to disable or destroy
the behemoths.

The Navy says the new carriers -- rising 20 stories above
the water, 1,092 feet (333 meters) long, moving at 30 knots (35
miles per hour) with almost 5,000 Americans on board -- can
project U.S. power around the globe.

“A carrier is 4 1/2 acres of sovereign U.S. territory,”
Captain Bruce Hay, a Navy pilot who helps set requirements for
the new carrier, said in an interview. “An aircraft carrier is
a piece of America, and we’re going to do what it takes to keep
them relevant because a carrier is presence and American resolve
all at one time.”

The ships’ rising costs are drawing scrutiny from lawmakers
at a time when the military faces cuts in personnel and funding
for new weapons. Critics see the new Gerald R. Ford-class
carriers as big targets for rival militaries expanding their
arsenals of ballistic and cruise missiles, undersea mines,
submarines, drones and cyber weapons.

“Our future adversaries are developing a set of
capabilities specifically for the purpose of attacking our
aircraft carriers,” Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow with the
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said in an
interview.

Increasing 18%

Although it’s still about five years from entering the
fleet, the price tag for the USS Gerald R. Ford, the first
carrier in the class being built by Huntington Ingalls
Industries Inc. (HII), based in Newport News, Virginia, already has
climbed about 18 percent in four years to $12.3 billion,
according to Defense Department data.

The Navy is trying to assure lawmakers that it was worth
the money to start from scratch designing a new carrier.

With an electromagnetic system to launch aircraft similar
to those used to propel roller coasters at Walt Disney World,
the Ford-class carriers are designed to send swarms of fighter
jets over vast expanses of water to deter potential enemies.

The Pentagon’s revised global strategy, released in
January, emphasizes a shift to the waters of the Asia-Pacific
region at the same time the Pentagon is moving to cut $487
billion from previously planned spending over the next decade.
More than $500 billion in additional defense cuts will be
required unless the president and Congress agree on plans to
avert the automatic reductions known as sequester that are set
to begin in January.

‘National Disgrace’

The Navy’s oversight of construction on the Gerald R. Ford,
or CVN-78, has drawn criticism as cost overruns of at least $800
million have been disclosed this year. Critics led by Senator
John McCain, a former Navy pilot, say the technologies that set
it apart from the Navy’s 10 existing carriers may not work as
planned when the carrier is launched and begins testing as early
as 2013.

“It’s outrageous, it’s a national disgrace,” McCain of
Arizona, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, said in an interview. “They try all these
experiments and all these different ideas that they have in the
new class of carrier and obviously disregard the cost.”

The Navy should have kept buying the proven Nimitz-class
carriers, McCain said. The last carrier in the Nimitz class, the
USS George H.W. Bush, was commissioned in 2009.

The number of aircraft regularly launched from the new
carriers, or the sortie rate, will increase to 160 a day from
120 a day now on the Nimitz class, according to the Navy. The
number of sorties can surge to 270 from 192 on the older
carriers.

Sub-Launched Tomahawks

Dispatching more jets from a carrier doesn’t provide a
tactical advantage in an age of precision-guided weapons and
Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from submarines, according to
Norman Polmar, a naval analyst and author who has been a
consultant to secretaries of the Navy.

“Do we need a new class?” Polmar said in an interview.
“The answer is absolutely not. You want to kill someone’s
airfield, you launch 20, 30 Tomahawks, which go farther and are
more accurate than planes, and you do not risk pilots.”

While a missile-armed submarine can move alone beneath the
sea, a carrier must travel with a strike group that typically
includes a guided-missile cruiser, two guided-missile
destroyers, an attack sub and a combined ammunition, oiler and
supply ship, according to a Navy fact sheet.

The Navy estimates that each Ford-class carrier will cost
$27 billion to build and then operate and maintain for 50 years,
$5 billion less than its Nimitz-class predecessors, even after
the rising costs.

Fewer Sailors

Half the savings will come from design and technology
changes that will reduce the number of sailors needed, Rear
Admiral Thomas Moore, who runs the Navy’s carrier programs, said
in an interview at the Washington Navy Yard. The Ford carriers
will accommodate 4,660 personnel, down from 5,922, according to
a presentation by Moore.

The Nimitz class was designed in the 1960s “when labor was
cheap, and so we used manpower to accomplish all the
functions,” Hay, the Navy pilot, said in an interview at the
Pentagon. “One guy grabbing a case of soda and going up and
down a ladder, well, that is a pretty expensive way to transport
material inside this kind of ship.”

Some critics of the Ford class’s rising cost, including
McCain, say carriers remain the invaluable, and virtually
unsinkable, centerpiece of U.S. naval strategy.

China’s Missiles

Others say carriers, like wooden men-of-war and steel
battleships before them, aren’t as useful as they once were.
With the proliferation of drones and satellite imagery, carriers
become easier to locate and thus potentially more vulnerable,
according to Polmar.

While the Ford carriers are going to be “very
formidable,” the ships “may not be able to get close enough to
a future enemy that has precision-guided anti-ship cruise and
ballistic missiles,” Gunzinger said.

China is fielding DF-21 anti-ship missiles that may force
U.S. carriers to operate 1,000 nautical miles or farther from an
enemy’s coastline early in a conflict, according to Gunzinger.
Carrier-based jets with a heavy load of weapons are designed to
strike at about 300 nautical miles without refueling, Polmar
said.

China also is developing weapons to attack satellites and
computer networks, disrupting long-distance U.S. military
sensors and communications networks, Gunzinger wrote in a report
last year for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments.

Iran’s Arsenal

Iran’s arsenal includes ballistic missiles that can reach
targets across the Persian Gulf region, Gunzinger wrote. Iranian
officials have threatened to use anti-ship cruise missiles,
smart mines that can sense their targets and swarms of small,
fast-attack craft to exert their control over the Strait of
Hormuz and Persian Gulf shipping lanes, he wrote. The strait is
about 21 miles (34 kilometers) across at its narrowest point,
with the shipping lane in either direction only two miles wide,
according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Gunzinger said carriers should be equipped with stealth
drones that can be launched undetected from greater distances to
find and attack their targets.

The combined cost of three Ford-class carriers would be
$42.5 billion, according to the Pentagon’s Selected Acquisition
Report published in December.

Electromagnetic Launches

The $12.3 billion for the first carrier includes about $3.7
billion in design and development.

“You are making a $3.7 billion design investment for a
class of ship that is going to be around for 94 years,” Moore
said. “This is not like building a Honda. It is probably the
most complex piece of machinery that is built in the world.”

Among new or updated equipment on the carrier will be its
nuclear power plant, weapons elevators, arresting gear and a
dual-band radar, according to Moore.

The launch system by General Atomics Corp. will use a
moving electromagnetic field to propel aircraft from the deck
instead of the steam-driven catapults on earlier carriers. The
carrier will have three aircraft elevators, each weighing 120
tons and able to lift two fighter jets at a time, according to
Huntington Ingalls.

Cutting Costs

The Navy is trying to reduce labor hours from 53 million on
the first ship to 40 million or less for the third, according to
Moore. That would make its cost comparable to the Nimitz class
when adjusted for inflation, he said.

“I am absolutely incentivized to drive that cost down as
low as possible,” Mike Petters, Huntington’s chief executive
officer, said in an interview at his office overlooking the
Newport News yard where the Ford is being built. The company
stands to lose as much as $194.3 million, more than 40 percent
of a potential fee, based on the overruns projected by the Navy.

Huntington Ingalls, spun off last year by defense
contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC), is working to preserve
support for the increasingly costly ships in Washington. The
company has a web of suppliers across the country that make the
case to Congress each year to protect carrier funding.

From 2005 to 2011, the shipbuilder and its predecessor
placed orders of about $3 billion in more than 330 of the 435
U.S. congressional districts, according to the Aircraft Carrier
Industrial Base Coalition, a group that says it represents about
400 companies.

“When you have 45 states that provide stuff for the ship,
it’s a fairly large job-creator,” said the Navy’s Admiral
Moore.